New Approaches to Themes Sacred and Sexual

In an imaginative new production of Richard Wagner's "Parsifal" that is perfectly suited to the music, François Girard successfully transforms the opera, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, from a faux-Christian rite into a timeless story about a beleaguered community that is held together—barely—by a sacred ritual that is itself under threat. Arresting, consistently absorbing stage pictures expertly follow the mournful flow of this slow-moving epic, while a powerhouse cast of singers and the Met Orchestra under the sure direction of
Daniele Gatti
ensure that the evening has both gravity and momentum.

In Wagner's libretto, the Holy Grail is protected by an order of knights. Their leader, Amfortas, suffers horribly from a wound that will not heal, and can be cured only by a holy fool who is "enlightened by compassion." Mr. Girard moves "Parsifal" into a postapocalyptic time. In Acts I and III,
Michael Levine's
striking set is a parched, treeless landscape bisected by a stream which flows with blood, a symbol of the wound that divides the community. The knights, in modern white shirts and black trousers (the costumes are by Thibault Vancraenenbroeck), huddle in a circle on one side of it. On the other is a silent, excluded group of women, an indication that Mr. Girard isn't going along with the libretto's premise that forbidden sexual desire is the root of all evil; rather, it is a symbol of a fractured society.

In Act II Parsifal, the "holy fool," descends into the wound itself—the Met stage is covered with a pool of "blood." Ghostly flower maidens with long black hair and white dresses tempt him in
Carolyn Choa's
creepy, seductive choreography. He resists them and the seductress Kundry, whose white dress and bed grow red with the blood as she splashes around in it. He recovers the lost Grail spear, kills the sorcerer Klingsor, and returns to the knights to heal Amfortas's wound and become their leader.

David Finn's
sensitive lighting dramatizes the deterioration of the knights' home between Acts I and Act III, and
Peter Flaherty's
video designs are eloquent, stylized abstractions—clouds, planets, landscape and even women's bodies—that enhance the drama of the transformation scenes and the Grail ritual.

Ritual remains a central feature of this production. Yet Mr. Girard also builds a poignantly human story through the principal singers. As Gurnemanz, the éminence grise of the grail knights, bass
René Pape
was magisterial and warm, with a penetrating delivery that enlivened his long monologues. Baritone
Peter Mattei
seemed to be living the agony of Amfortas, both in the fierceness of his singing and his halting, excruciating attempts to walk.
Jonas Kaufmann
made Parsifal complicated and vivid, from the adolescent shrug with which he conveyed his initial lack of understanding to the pure, messianic authority of his final transformation.
Evgeny Nikitin
was a properly brutal, slashing Klingsor, and
Katarina Dalayman
brought controlled passion to Kundry, expertly crafting the seduction scene. Mr. Girard has her lift the Grail for the final ritual, as the women and the men mix together onstage for the first time. Wagner might not have approved, but the gesture of reconciliation, overriding the libretto's misogyny and obsession with male purity, fit the music and completed Mr. Girard's moving, modern vision.

***

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Misogyny is certainly a central theme in Thomas Adès's debut opera, "Powder Her Face" (1995), presented by the New York City Opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last weekend. Based on the true story of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, whose reportedly insatiable sexual appetite was a tabloid scandal during her 1963 divorce proceedings, "Powder Her Face" is an oddly chilly affair, though
Jay Scheib's
ingenious production worked hard to generate some heat.

The opera (
Philip Hensher
wrote the libretto) is constructed in eight scenes, beginning and ending in 1990, as the Duchess is about to be evicted from her hotel room for unpaid bills and is being mocked by an electrician and her maid. In between, flashbacks show key episodes in her life.
Marsha Ginsberg's
powder-blue set mutated quickly—shifting walls, beds and tables to create different venues. Act I was a chaotic carnival of licentiousness, its jittery, often lewd-sounding orchestrations and quick changes of mood mirrored by real-time video of what was happening both onstage and behind the scenes (cocaine-snorting in a mirrored bathroom, for example). For the scene in which the Duchess seduces a room-service waiter, in an aria that is mostly gulps and gurgles, 24 naked men, just a few of her many conquests, wandered about onstage. Like the video, and the sudden, disturbing camera flashes throughout the production, their presence made the audience complicit in the general debauchery by turning us into voyeurs.

Act II slowed things down for longer set pieces: the divorce-trial judge's puritanical summation (while he was being serviced under the table) and the Duchess's wistful aria about lack of real love in her life. Still, one could never quite warm to the Duchess. The score is clever and well constructed, with echoes of Kurt Weill,
Benjamin Britten
and
Alban Berg,
but it is finally superficial, without the pathos or the horror of that other opera about a female sexual monster, "Lulu."

Mezzo
Allison Cook
was remarkably dignified as the indomitable Duchess, and she looked splendid in
Alba Clemente's
striking costumes, which included some very skimpy lingerie.
Nili Riemer
ably navigated the high soprano flights of the Maid and other roles (she got some of the best tunes; Mr. Adès would go even wilder with this tessitura for Ariel in "The Tempest"). Tenor
William Ferguson
was callously bright-voiced as the Electrician and the Duchess's other tormenters, and bass
Matt Boehler
brought simian flexibility to the grotesque leaps of the Judge's aria and a cavernous voice of doom to the Hotel Manager. Conductor
Jonathan Stockhammer
skillfully kept everything together, yet slightly off balance at the same time.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.